All posts tagged Italy

Migration, initially expected to take center stage at a European Union summit this week, will be pushed aside in favor of other hot-button issues despite the crisis at the bloc’s borders, Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner for Home Affairs, conceded in an interview.

But the need for action is not going away, Ms. Malmström said. If anything, it may ramp up as refugees pour in from the bitter conflicts in Iraq and Syria.

She made it clear that more far-reaching actions are not in the cards anytime soon, as a push for new initiatives collides with political and financial realities. For example, the EU won’t take over Italy’s costly search-and-rescue operation, Mare Nostrum; set up EU-run asylum application centers at the neighborhood’s hotspots; or give more funding to Frontex, the EU border agency. Read More »

Oh, Ryanair. Deploy the landing gear on the publicity machine because the circus is coming to town! And by town we mean Brussels National Airport in Zaventem, as opposed to Brussels South/Charleroi/Gosselies/the middle of bloody nowhere/a black hole of Walloon state aid*, where the airline currently bases its Brussels-area flights.

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary was actually in rather restrained form in making the announcement this morning. After going for one of the oldest publicity tricks in the book – reserving a room much too small for his press conference – he explained how his discount airline was so “so special, so wonderful, so brilliant, and yet so humble.”

Read on to see where the budget airline will be flying to from February… Read More »

And for the ninth year in a row, Italy was the bad boy of the class. The country was facing 99 so-called infringement procedures at the end of last year — the first stage in the process by which the commission can force member states to apply EU rules. Ironically, Italy’s prime minister last year was Mario Monti, who spent almost a decade in Brussels at the top echelons of the commission. Read More »

Visibly moved, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso spoke to reporters Wednesday from Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island off the coast of Tunisia. He’d just seen the lines of coffins of the hundreds of African migrants who perished on their way to Italy last week. He was shocked.

So was Cecilia Malmström, the commissioner in charge of migration, who sat next to him.

“I will never forget the sight of 280 coffins today. I will bear this with me for the rest of my life and I think they express something that we need to think about in the European Union, this isn’t the European Union we want,” she said.

Shock and doubt at Europe’s moral standing when it comes to those desperate enough to flee home on unsafe boats to get to Europe dominated a debate at the European Parliament Wednesday morning.

But shock doesn’t necessarily translate into policy, or, for that matter, into substantial funding.

Mr. Barroso said the commission would give Italy an additional €30 million this year to help refugees there. It is, by all accounts, a small amount. But at the end of the EU budget period, Mr. Barroso is constrained. Read More »

A new study of democracy in the European Union labels Greece and Hungary the most worrisome “backsliders” on democratic values, but also urges special attention to Bulgaria, Romania, Spain and Italy.

The report, conducted by the Demos think tank for the European Parliament’s Socialists and Democrats group, says the current financial crisis has heightened antidemocratic trends, but that this isn’t the sole factor.

The EU should embrace its role as a watchdog of democracy, the paper says, and not see itself as solely an economic bloc. The report cites five major areas of democratic “backsliding.” Read More »

Next week is a big one for the folks at DG Ecfin (the European Commission’s economic and finanical affairs branch), who get to engage in their annual nitpicking of European Union countries’ weaknesses in the country-specific recommendations. Apart from that, it looks to be a light seven days in the Brussels bubble.

Here are some of the key events:

Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan will be in Brussels Monday to meet with all the three presidents –- the commission’s José Manuel Barroso, the European Council’s Herman Van Rompuy and the European Parliament’s Martin Schulz. Earlier this week the EU approved a €30 million mission to help Libya bolster its borders. Read More »

Changing euro-zone labor-market institutions has been one of the main goals of the bailout programs managed by the International Monetary Fund and euro-zone authorities over the last three years.

The thinking is: Europe’s labor markets – particularly those in the euro-zone periphery – need overhauls to allow wages to keep pace with changes in productivity and economic circumstances. This sounds like dry stuff, but it’s been one of the fund’s more controversial bailout recommendations. Making labor markets more “flexible” has in practice meant reducing the role of labor unions in wage-setting across much of southern Europe, leaving unions none-too-pleased with their more limited powers.

In a paper published on Friday, IMF economists led by Olivier Blanchard took a somewhat soul-searching look at the fund’s labor-market advice over the last three years. One interesting finding: The fund should “tread carefully” in its recommendations on collective bargaining, the paper suggests, since evidence about what kinds of bargaining institutions work best is mixed. Read More »

If you were a populist politician in Italy, you could probably generate a lot of noise about Italy’s huge gold reserves. There they are, the third largest national gold stockpile in the world, and you need the permission of the European Central Bank’s governing council in Frankfurt to do anything with them.

There are people, judging from my Twitter feed, who think it would be a travesty to use them to help ease Italy’s financial travails because it’s “monetary gold,” which raises the question of what 2,450 metric tons of the inert yellow metal held by the Bank of Italy is actually for. (This is the amount left after Italy’s contribution to the ECB’s own capital, 15% of which has to be in gold.)

Life and work in the European Union is coming to mean increasingly different things to its 500 million citizens, depending on where they live, with divergence in unemployment rates, child poverty, hours worked and household disposal income widening.

A prime example is unemployment: The report says that the gap between the country reporting the lowest rate–Austria, at 4.5%– and that reporting the highest rate–Spain at 25.1%– is at an all-time high of 20.6 percentage points.

Just three member states are now reporting youth-unemployment rates below 10%: Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. More than 30% of Slovakian, Portuguese, Italian and Irish youths are out of work. But for young Spaniards and Greeks, prospects are even worse, with more than half of them jobless in each country. Read More »

Just as Brussels is finally enjoying a spell of summer sun, there’s more good news for debt-crisis watchers who stayed behind in the European Union’s headquarters: The Peterson Institute for International Economics, an eminent Washington-based think tank, says the debt loads of Italy and Spain are (most likely) sustainable.

In a new working paper, William R. Cline—a sovereign-debt crisis veteran going back all the way to Latin America’s troubles in the 1980s–calculates different trajectories for the debt loads of the two countries whose financial fate is seen as central to the survival of the euro. The interesting thing about the paper is that it not only examines three typical scenarios (good, baseline, bad) and applies them to five variables (the level of growth, primary surplus, interest rates, bank recapitalizations, and privatization receipts), but also assesses the probability of several of these variables going bad (or good) at the same time. In other words, Mr. Cline calibrated the effect of, say, low privatization receipts on a government’s primary surplus or the interest rates it’s likely to pay on its bonds.

His conclusion–which should delight policymakers in Rome, Madrid, and Brussels alike–is that the most likely outcome by the end of the decade is that “both Spain and Italy remain solvent” and that they won’t need a debt restructuring á la Greece or, even worse, leave the euro zone. Read More »

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.